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Dell EMC announces hyper-converged, hybrid cloud upgrades

In addition to upgrades to VxRail, VxRack SDDC, both their Enterprise and Native hybrid clouds, and new turnkey VMware Ready Systems for ‘do it yourself’ cloud deployments, Dell EMC also announced GA for XtemIO X2 and an upgrade of their Dell Data Protection Suite for Applications.

Today at VMworld, Dell EMC has made a flurry of announcements relating to the VMware side of their hyper-converged and hybrid cloud portfolios. They include updated Dell EMC VxRail Appliances and an enhanced VxRack SDDC. New capabilities were also announced for the Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, and the Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud. Dell EMC also announced new turnkey VMware Ready Systems that combine VMware cloud software with VxRail or VxRack SDDC, and will be available later this year. The company also announced the general availability of their XtremIO X2 All-Flash array, and a new release of the Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications.

“Hyper-converged is the fastest growing market in IT right now, and VxRail is the fastest growing hyper-converged product in history, with triple-digit growth,” said Bob Wambach, VP of Product Marketing in Dell EMC’s Converged Platforms and Systems Division. The new announcement around the VxRail appliances, which are powered by VMware vSAN and jointly engineered with VMware, is the new 4.5 version of their software. It offers simple automation and lifecycle management for the latest VMware technologies – vSphere 6.5 update 1 and vSAN 6.6 update.

“This will deliver up to 50 per cent better performance and 30 per cent reduction in latency,” Wambach said.

Dell EMC VxRail 4.5 software will be available for new orders beginning in September 2017. Existing customers will be able to upgrade to VxRail 4.5 shortly after in Q4.

“It’s more of a data centre-in-a-box at scale, and an easy way to stand up VMware environments,” Wambach said. “It’s a turnkey data centre with a lot of management and automation included, and we see this as more of way the future for larger enterprises.”

The enhancements to the VxRack SDDC feature its now being powered by the VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware’s new hyper-converged infrastructure for building private clouds, and integrating them easily with public clouds, with a single management cluster which allows automation and lifecycle management of VMware vSphere 6.5, vSAN 6.6 and NSX 6.3 in a single stack.

Dell EMC VxRack SDDC, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, is planned for global availability by end of September 2017.

Dell EMC also announced enhancements to their two hybrid cloud platforms. The Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) is now available on the VxRack SDDC.

“We earlier brought EHC to VxRail, and that has done exceptionally well,” Wambach said. “A lot of the initial interest in EHC on VxRail was on single sites, but we have now added support for multi-sites on VxRail deployments as well.” Up to four sites can be supported, with virtual machine-level disaster recovery and management through a single portal.

Public cloud options have also been increased with the addition of Microsoft Azure as an end-point for EHC.

Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud on VxRack SDDC is available now.

Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud [NHC] has received similar enhancements.

“Think of NHC as a single more focused solution optimized for Cloud Native development,” Wambach said. “It’s the simplest and best way to run Pivotal Cloud Foundry.”

Like EHC, it has already been on VxRail, and the VxRail multi-site capability for NHC is new with this release. NHC built on VxRack SDDC also is available today, through an early access program, with general availability planned for 2018.

Dell EMC is also announcing the Workbench, a set of tools that help developers and operators new to Pivotal Cloud Foundry launches with the Access Testing Tool and new Deployment Management Tool. It lets developers quickly diagnose connectivity issues to legacy environments. IT operators can maintain control by setting rules and policies while developers can push applications securely to multiple locations with one click. The Workbench tools are available now.

“While both these Hybrid Clouds are turnkey, we also see a significant opportunity for a velocity and volume play,” Wambach said. “Enterprise hybrid clouds are still typically large scale and complex. So we are introducing VMware Ready Systems, which will provide a path to “do-it-yourself” hybrid clouds of all sizes. VMware Ready Systems will reach higher volumes by standardizing capabilities. They are for the thousands and thousands of customers beyond the largest, to allow them to adopt these technologies.”

The new VMware Ready Systems from Dell EMC will be pre-tested and highly repeatable cloud offerings that combine VMware cloud software with VxRail Appliances or VxRack SDDC Systems. They have planned global availability in the second half of 2017.

In addition to the multi-faceted hyper-converged news, Dell EMC made some other announcements. They announced the general availability of XtremIO X2, the next generation of their purpose-built All-Flash array,

“The new platform now has up to 80 per cent better response time, with a 33 per cent lower cost per virtual desktop than the previous generation,” said Ruya Atac-Barrett, Senior Director Data Protection Product Marketing at Dell EMC.

Dell EMC also announced a significant new release of their Data Protection Suite for Applications.

“What is really important here is the introduction of a source-based data path directly from the VMware hypervisor to Data Domain,” Atac-Barrett said. “This fully automates the data protection, so customers can keep up with backup SLAs and not impact production environments. This solves both technological and operational challenges.”

Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications will be available in Q3, with support for Oracle databases available in Q4.